Sliding vs Deciding®: This blog is about romantic relationships and marriage, with insights from relationship science about how relationships develop and what makes or breaks them.

Friday, February 9, 2018

“That Decision Wasn’t Made There”: A Super Bowl Insight on Commitment

I’m sure there is some lesson about commitment in most any
Super Bowl, but I think sports commenter Colin Cowherd (@ColinCowherd)
gets at something special in his observation about Super Bowl LII, which you
can find in this video onYouTube.

I’ll describe the key point, but if you have a few minutes
and want to take it in, Cowherd makes his point with style. From 0:00 to 2:47
will do the job.

Before going to substance, I want to declare my conflicts of
non-interest. I’m neither a fan of the
Eagles nor of the Patriots. I’m not much of a football fan, except that I do
now hope the Broncos get Foles for next year. Further, I didn’t care about who
would win this game until it was going; and once it was, I started rooting for the
Eagles. I’ll cop to that.

What Cowherd Observed

Commitment is about making a choice to give up other
choices. It’s about deciding. Clear decisions anchor commitments, and the
timing of those clear decisions often matters. In contrast, sliding through key
moments is letting stuff happen to you, and it can result in losing options
before making a choice. I’m usually making these points about marriage and
family, but they apply to everything important. Cowherd gets at what is one of
the most important insights about commitment that Galena Rhoades and I are
often highlighting.

Cowherd focuses on the Eagles decision to go for it on fourth
down, trailing by 1 point, with 5:40 left on the clock. Teams usually punt in
that circumstance, and I thought the Eagles would do just that in the hopes of stopping
New England and getting the ball back. (There’s a growing thought around the
NFL that teams should usually be going for it on 4th-and-1, by the
way, but that’s not been the convention. It might start to be.) My youngest son
thought they would go for it. He was right, and he’s the one who got me to
watch Cowherd give his analysis.

Of that moment, on 4th-and-1, Cowherd says, “That
decision wasn’t made there.”

I think he’s exactly right. Cowherd observed that the Eagles
didn’t even call a time out to think about it, and on a play that he believes is
one of the gutsiest calls in Super Bowl history. Instead, the Eagles already
knew what they were going to do. In fact, they’d made a similarly bold 4th
and 1 conversion in the first half, when the Eagles’ quarterback Nick Foles
became the receiver for a touchdown. I’ve watched enough football to know that
if you are going for it on 4th-and-1, you are usually trying a brute
force attempt, not some utterly surprising trick play.

Here’s the good part. Cowherd attributes the Eagles’ game
play to a decision made two weeks before by the Philadelphia coaches in a
meeting. A decision that was talked about, thought about, and that guided the
Eagles minds and motivation over the past couple weeks. They had pre-decided to
go for it, all the time, every time. It’s fair for you to think I have now
become totally mired in sport’s cliché drivel. You know, “they left it all on
the field.” “They came to play.” “They dug deep.” Could be, but I think Cowherd’s
right to imply that this is not that. Or, at the least, I’m going to suggest
it’s more than that.

As Cowherd notes, The Patriots have a history of getting
behind and then coming back and destroying the other team, often in a final
drive at the end of the game. It’s kind of a brand. They’ve turned the tide
more often than you’re ever going to see something like detergent commercials
in Super Bowl games.

New England is a widely disliked team for a number of
reasons, and I think the biggest reason goes beyond a few notable, naughty behaviors.
It’s not just balls that get deflated around New England. It’s teams. It’s
cities. I think what people feel about the Patriots is archetypal. New England
represents the relentless challenges of life that too often wear us down and
wipe us out. They crush our dreams as time is running out. That’s who the
Eagles were playing, and that is important here.

Cowherd observes that the Eagles had decided, two weeks before,
this:

“We’re not going to be Atlanta. We’re not going to outplay
New England and lose.”

“We’re not going to be Jacksonville. We’re not going to
outplay New England and lose.”

“We’re not going to be Pittsburgh. We’re not going to
outplay New England and lose.”

The Eagles had pre-decided they were going to play this game
with a highly disciplined abandon. They ran some risky plays. They kept pushing
hard even when ahead. The Eagles weren’t waiting for the Patriots to happen to
them in the usual way of life.

Why isn’t this a typical sport’s cliché? Because of the
timing of the key decision.

Timing is a Lot of the Things

Timing may not be everything, but timing is a lot of the things that matter most.
Before my metaphorical final drive (the next section of this piece), two quick
points about timing and commitment from my area of theory and research: One point
is about parental commitment and babies and the other is about
the timing of commitment relative to living together.

When a couple is having a child, it matters a great deal
whether or not they had decided before conception if they were doing life together. A couple can decide after a
baby is on the way to build a life together, but that’s a decision being made on
4th down, during a time-out, in the middle of the pressure of the
big game. A decision about the future is best made when the future is not
already here.

When a couple moves in together, it matters whether or not they’ve
already decided they are committed to the future--beforehand. Living together
makes it harder to break up, and a lot of people don’t see this until they are
deep into the game and behind on the scoreboard. As our research has shown,
those who marry, or who have at least gotten engaged, before moving in together
tend to do better once married. Does that mean the other couples are doomed?
Surely not. It’s an edge, an advantage. Nothing is a slam dunk (oops, wrong
sport!). Anyway, the point is the same as the one above about babies. It helps
when the big decision about the future was made before the two people were already
constrained by their situation.

When it comes to consequential moments that can be life
altering, it’s best if you can say, “That decision wasn’t made there.”

This Gets It

There are a lot of times in life where you are going to fail
because you’ve not decided ahead of the critical moment what you are about and what
you are committed to do. I don’t mean you can anticipate everything that will
happen. You can’t. Sometimes, you need to change something in your pre-decided
plan. Sometimes, you need to call an audible or else you’ll get mauled.

I also don’t mean to suggest that clear commitments at the
right time for the right reason always insulate you from loss. None of us knows
how the game is going to play out, including in our relationships. It is a fact
recently demonstrated that you can play out your game plan, executed relatively
well, produce 505 yards of offense—and still lose.

But in the main, those who have decided beforehand what they
are going after, and how deeply they are committed to achieving it, will come
out ahead, whether it is in marriage or work or anything else that matters. Why?
Because you are not chronically trying to decide—in the moment—what would have
been better decided beforehand.

About Me

I am a research professor who conducts studies on marriage and romantic relationships. Along with my colleagues, I also develop materials to help people in their relationships based on research.
In addition to academic publications, I have written or co-written a number of books (see below). Together with colleagues Howard Markman and Natalie Jenkins, I head up a team at PREP, Inc. that produces various materials for use in marriage and relationship education. Howard Markman, Galena Rhoades, and I head up our research team at the University of Denver.

Why Sliding vs. Deciding?

Sliding vs. Deciding is a theme that comes out of my study of commitment and my work with my major colleague in this work, Galena Rhoades. I believe “sliding vs. deciding” captures something important about how romantic relationships develop. The core idea is that people often slide through important transitions in relationships rather than deciding what they are doing and what it means. For example, sociologists Wendy Manning and Pamela Smock conducted a qualitative study of cohabiting couples and found that over one half of couples who are living together didn’t talk about it but simply slid into doing so, paralleling prescient observations from Jo Lindsey in 2000. In our large quantitative study of cohabitation, we have found that most cohabiters report a process more like sliding into cohabitation than talking about it and making a decision about it.

In contrast to sliding, commitments that we are most likely to follow through on are based in decisions. In fact, commitment is making a choice to give up other choices. A commitment is a decision. Do we always need to be making a decision about things? I hope not. But when something important in life is at stake, I believe that deciding will trump sliding in how things turn out.

One of the most important implications of the concept of sliding vs. deciding is when this theme is married to our work and thought on the depths of ambiguity in relationship formation these days and our ideas about inertia. What people are often now seeing is that they are sliding through relationship transitions that cause them to increase constraints and lose options before (or without) noticing that they have just entered a more constrained pathway. As a result, we believe that many people are too often giving up options before they have made a choice. That is far from making a choice to give up other choices. That's losing options because one is not noticing an important, or even potentially high cost slide, is not what solid commitment formation is about.

Three of the most important theory papers written by me and Galena Rhoades are accessible above at the links: "Sliding vs. Deciding: Inertia and the Premarital Cohabitation Effect", "Commitment: Functions, Formation, and the Securing of Romantic Attachment," and the link labeled "SvD Transition and Risk Model."